Francis Story The Search for the Self

The search for Self is vain, because it is a search for something that does not exist except as a mythical concept which has had to be taken into the structure of language by common assent. If it is used in any other way than as a fictitious convenience - if it is taken as meaning something real and enduring - it cannot be anything but a stumbling-block to the development of right understanding.

Friday, January 30, 2015

Yesterday evening, Lindsay and I went the the book launch of I'll See Myself Out, Thank You, an anthology of short pieces about assisted dying by a range of candidates, carers, relatives and professionals in favour of changes in the law, some wanting to go further than the current Assisted Dying Bill. There was also a showing of the video Glenn's Last Tape, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RXQLF9uTL0) about the last months of Glenn Scott, who died by his own hand of Motor Neurone Disease after a year of progressive deterioration.the inevitable course of the disease. He had the resources, the intelligence and the determination to plan and organise his death in his beloved Rome, but he recognised that most people 'don't know where to turn', faced with the approach of the gradual loss of all physical ability. That's why there is a desperate need for a lawful way of terminally ill people giving up life with medical help. Nobody with an ounce of compassion would be able to see Glenn's agonising last months without enormous sympathy, and a strong desire to see that Parliament makes it possible for others with MND or similar terminal illnesses to see themselves out.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Santosh Dass,
President of the Federation of Ambedkarite amd Buddhist Organisations UK, with
Vinod Tawade, Minister for School Education,
Sports and Youth Welfare, Higher and Technical Education, Government of
Maharashtra, at the future Ambedkar Centre

Warmest congratulations to FABOUK and its President
Santosh Dass. The Ambedkar centre will remind us that we still need to
work for the elimination of disadvantage and discrimination, in the UK and in
India

After months of uncertainty, India has moved to
intervene in the sale of a house in London where B R Ambedkar lived in 1921 as
a student, with the Maharashtra government set to buy the property. The
government plans to acquire and convert the house into a museum by April 14,
Ambedkar Jayanti.

The two-storey apartment in north-west London covers 2,050 square feet. At the
entrance is a blue plaque which says Ambedkar stayed there while studying at
the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1921-22.

Maharashtra government’s intervention came when the state’s education minister
Vinod Tawde, who was on an official trip to London, visited the house and met
representatives of the Indian high commission. He was accompanied by Santosh
Dass, president of Federation of Ambedkarite and Buddhist Organisations, UK
(FABOUK), who led efforts to acquire the house after it came on the market last
year. Tawde spoke to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis who have him the go-ahead
to purchase the property.

"The residence which will be converted into a museum will be open to
public from April 14, which is Dr Ambedkar's birth anniversary," Tawde
said. A statement issued by him in Marathi said the house will be bought for Rs
35 crore.

Dass said she was delighted with the Maharashtra government’s decision. Indian
representatives would soon begin negotiations with the estate agent and house
owner to complete the sale.

The house was put on the market for a minimum price of 3.1 million pounds last
year. A private developer had placed a bid and completed initial formalities,
but Dass alerted Maharashtra officials before the sale could be completed.

“India intervened at the right time. We are delighted that we will soon have a
fitting memorial for Ambedkar and an international mission base. It was in
London that Ambedkar formulated his views on eradication of caste-based
discrimination, and the rights of women,” Dass told HT. Ambedkar’s grandson
Prakash, who leads the Bharip Bahujan Mahasangh, thanked the Fadnavis
government.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

As a friend of Nabeel Rajab, Sheikh Ali Salman and most of the 'Bahraini 13' who are serving long sentences including life for freedom of expression offences, Philip Hammond doesn't speak for me. [http://bit.ly/1E6iN2a] People should be allowed to criticise their government and to call for it to be changed, and its outrageous for Hammond to praise a hereditary absolute monarchy that locks peaceful opponents up and takes away their citizenship for these 'offences'.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

None of the values are within normal range, but Hb is just above the level at which DIPSS+ indicates a worse prognosis. The consultant agreed that an abrupt change doesn't really occur, and she also acknowledges that a single point for age over 65 doesn't accurately reflect the actual position. I think my own arbitrary adjustment for these two factors will turn out to be closer to reality, giving a departure date of July 2016.

PS Jan 22 Saw GP Dr F this evening who prescribed 1.25 mg Ramipril as well as the 10 mg Amlodipine I'm already taking since the visit to the New Cross 24-hour walk-in centre the Sunday before last. When I was discharged from King's in June all the blood pressure medication was knocked off, for review by the GP, but the message wasn't received. So I'm back to the list I was on before the pneumonia.

Friday, January 16, 2015

Chancel Repairs

Question for Short Debate

4 pm

Asked by Lord Avebury

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to abolish the liability of private householders and others for chancel repairs.

Lord Avebury (LD): My Lords, a consensus that reform of the law on chancel repairs is long overdue has emerged from discussions with the church, the Law Commission, the Law Society, the Country Landowners’ Association and the National Secular Society. Since the Chancel Repairs Bill will not make further progress until after the general election, a preliminary debate on the issues is useful now.

By the 12th century, the liability to pay for chancel repairs, the CRL, was already linked to the tithes being received by the rectors of certain parishes. At the Reformation, Henry VIII sold the right to the tithes to lay people who became liable for chancel repairs as “lay rectors”. Under the current law, the Tithe Act 1936, some lay rectors are still responsible for those repairs, but the tithes which originally enabled them to make a profit from the transaction were abolished. The unfortunate remnants were those who owned land that was not relieved of the burden in 1936, or their successors in title, who have been living under a sword of Damocles for the past 78 years. It is for discussion whether major institutions such as the schools of Eton and Winchester or the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge should continue to be required to pay long-standing non land-based CRL, but it is unreasonable for the owners of generally small plots of land in some 2,500 Anglican parishes in England—around half of them—to be potentially liable for the charge, which is without limit.

The Chancel Repairs Act 1932 reasserted the little-used right to enforce CRL, but transferred enforcement from the ecclesiastical courts to the county courts

15 Jan 2015 : Column GC274

after a lay rector was sentenced to prison by the High Court for contempt of the ecclesiastical court for non-payment of CRL. It was seldom recovered during the succeeding half-century, and in 1981 the General Synod accepted the recommendation of its standing committee, headed by the late Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Runcie, to phase it out. In moving to receive the committee’s report, Mr Clark of Southwark said:

“So I hope we shall support the suggestion that we phase out these liabilities, just as the Church of the 1830s agreed reluctantly to tithes being phased out”.

The synod approved the recommendation, but declined to use its legislative powers to implement it. Soon after, and with Church of England involvement, the Law Commission recommended the abolition of CRL by statute after a 10-year notice period, which would by now have long expired. That recommendation, made in a well argued paper, was not implemented, but if the synod itself agreed to ending CRL, thinking it unlikely that compensation would be forthcoming from the Government in 1982, it would be even less realistic in this age of austerity to expect the taxpayer to reimburse parishes for the loss of a doubtful future income. Given the furore over even the registration of CRL of properties in the roughly one in 20 parishes thought eligible to do so, parochial church councils have wisely refrained from enforcing their legal rights since 2003, so are they worth anything?

The state already contributes hugely to the upkeep of churches through gift aid worth some £84 million; the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme worth £42 million; the National Heritage Memorial Fund, currently funding repairs to Winchester Cathedral costing £14 million and of York Minster at £18.3 million; further grants to cathedrals recently announced worth £8 million; Heritage Lottery Fund grants to churches of £300 million in the 10 years to 2004, the lion’s share to the Church of England; and finally, £15 million recently announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer for repairs to church roofs and rainwater pipes under the Listed Places of Worship Roof Repair Fund.

In 2003, following a refusal by English Heritage to fund repairs to the church in Aston Cantlow in Warwickshire, the local PCC refused an offer of £25,000 from the lay rectors, Mr and Mrs Wallbank, and the parish took the case all the way to the House of Lords, with the active support of the Archbishops’ Council. There, the Wallbanks lost, and had to sell their farm to pay the CRL and costs approaching £500,000.

Parliament reacted with an order providing for registration of CRL at the Land Registry, to alert buyers to land being subject to the liability, since it was rarely shown on deeds, but lawyers doubt whether buyers of unregistered land are protected as envisaged when the order was enacted. The church warned PCCs that failure to register under the order might render trustees personally liable, so it is little wonder that an estimated 17,000 titles in a few hundred parishes have been registered. The vast majority are owned by ordinary householders, not major landowners.

Attempts were made to mitigate the harm to the mission of the church that registration caused. Titles were singled out where the return seemed most lucrative or there was likely to be opposition. PCCs often

15 Jan 2015 : Column GC275

announced that there was no intention of enforcing the liability. However, assurances are not legally binding and can be rescinded at the stroke of a pen. Even cancellation of the registration does not extinguish the right to enforcement.

PCCs were ill equipped for the laborious and exacting work of registration, often involving missing, archaic or inaccurate documents. Unsurprisingly, thousands of registrations have been made in error, compounding the distress caused to householders. This happened, for example, in Gorleston in Norfolk, where all of the nearly 1,000 registrations had to be withdrawn.

Given the hostility to registration reported by the media, churches would find it extraordinarily difficult and counterproductive in terms of their relationships with their parishes to sue for recovery of CRL. It appears not to have been attempted since Aston Cantlow. Registration is literally a medieval anomaly that undermines the value and saleability of land, creating lasting animosity towards the church, without achieving the objective of improving the funding of chancel repairs. It aims at taxing citizens who may not even be Christian or belong to any religion, for the purposes of one faith out of dozens in our multicultural society.

Even more harmful for many landowners than the exposure to unquantifiable and theoretically limitless CRL is the blight of registration, significantly reducing the sale price and even making the property unsaleable, particularly to buyers requiring mortgages. Since Aston Cantlow, purchasers of land have routinely taken out insurance against having to pay CRL, and this has proved very lucrative to the insurance industry, given that payouts have been minimal. But for property blighted by registration, premiums are astronomical or insurance is totally unavailable.

The only fair solution is abolition, modelled on the Law Commission’s recommendation, but until that can be effected, a much greater availability is needed of compounding—the ability to buy out the liability to CRL, at low cost and minimal professional fees. At Edingale in the diocese of Lichfield, the diocese agreed after long and stressful negotiations to accept just £45 from a householder to extinguish her liability to pay CRL of thousands of times that amount if it had been recoverable. Without compounding, any would-be purchaser would have had to take into account the probability that, ultimately, the church would be able to enforce the claim, as it did in Aston Cantlow.

Some dioceses already recommend compounding, but a uniform countrywide scheme would be the ideal, possibly by way of amendments to the Ecclesiastical Dilapidations Measure 1923. The initiatives of the Reverend Greg Yerbury, team rector of Penkridge, Staffs, might provide a useful model. In any case, based on the principle that half a loaf is better than no bread, it might be sensible for the church to devise a workable national scheme for compounding before we return to the Chancel Repairs Bill, abolishing CRL altogether after the general election.

A coalition of cross-party peers has
moved to water down proposed legislation that would let the terminally ill
request and receive help to end their lives.

The Assisted Dying Bill, proposed by former Lord
Chancellor Lord Falconer, has divided the House of Lords and is scheduled for
its latest debate on Friday. The Bill has made it further through Parliament
than many politicians expected. The Private Member's Bill, not yet backed by
any political parties, would let people request assistance in killing
themselves if their terminal illness means they are likely to have no more than
six months left to live. But critics are worried that this could be abused or
have unintended consequences, such as sick people, fearing they are a burden on
their families, requesting death even though they want to live.

Liberal Democrat Lord Carlile,
Labour's Lord Darzi and crossbencher Lord Harries, have submitted an amendment
which would see the six-month life expectancy limit reduced to three months.
Lord Carlile opposes assisted dying "philosophically", as he does not
believe anyone should be given the right to kill another person, but wanted to
alter this aspect of the Bill in case assisted dying ever becomes law.

"The amendment is intended to
tighten [issues surrounding] terminal illness," said Lord Carlile.
"The nearer to death you are the less likely it [the prognosis] will be
wrong."

Lord Falconer said this weekend that
only granting people the right to assisted dying with three months or less to
live would mean that in many cases it could be too late for them. They might
already be in such pain that there would no longer be many benefits to choosing
the timing of their own death.

"It's a big issue, whether six
months is too short or too long," said Lord Falconer. "You've got to
give people long enough to make their choices. I will be saying let's start
with six months: opponents are trying to ambush the Bill. The time has come for
change."

Even if the Bill gets through the
Lords this week, there is insufficient time before the election to get it
debated and passed in the House of Commons. Lord Falconer is hoping to
"carry over" the Bill to the next Parliament, no matter which party
or parties are in government, so that it does not have to be re-introduced from
scratch.

As it is a Private Member's rather
than a government Bill, this would be an unusual move, but Lord Falconer is
contacting senior Whips in major parties to see if they will consent to the
idea.

One peer who is pushing hard for the
Bill to become law early in the next Parliament is Lord Avebury, the LibDem who
is widely considered to have achieved the most stunning by-election victory of
the 20th century when he took Orpington in 1962. Overturning a huge
Conservative majority, the win signalled a revival of a Liberal Party that had
been in the doldrums for decades.

The 86-year-old is terminally ill
with a rare bone-marrow condition, myelofibrosis, and has calculated that he
has about 19 months left to live.

"I honestly can't understand why
anybody would oppose this Bill," said Lord Avebury. "It seems to me
obvious that a person should have control over his own life and that people who
are trying to stop it are being very selfish about it.

"It's not obviously something
that affects them as they don't need it, so to make it impossible for anybody
else to take advantage of a law of this kind seems peculiarly perverse."

Lord Avebury says the Bill's
opponents should look at evidence from the US state of Oregon, where assisted
dying has been legal since 1997. "No one has alleged that greedy relatives
have tried to persuade someone to take advantage of the law so as to collect
the money," he argued.

Supportive peers would like to see
their parties make manifesto commitments to giving the Bill plenty of
Parliamentary time for debate after the election. The Earl of Arran, a
Conservative, said he would "love it" if this appeared in any party
manifesto, while fellow Tory Baroness Wheatcroft argues that "the body of
[public] opinion is moving more and more in favour" of assisted suicide.

The party leaders, who have left
assisted suicide as a free vote and therefore a matter of conscience for their
Parliamentarians, are also under pressure from their MPs to consider whether
the Bill should become law. Norman Lamb, the Health minister who has been
tipped as a future leader of the LibDems, said: "I hope that our party, if
it is in government, helps to facilitate the debate going forward to the next
Parliament."

Tory MP Sir Richard Ottaway said that
"a serious assault" on getting assisted dying on to the statute books
was needed.